Sunrise Postmortem: Part I (Sprite Art)

by S.

Sunrise Sprite Breakdown

The above image shows the basic stages of sprite construction in Photoshop. Sofia was the final sprite I painted, and by that time I nearly tossed the drawing stage altogether and went straight to the underpainting stage.

The approach I took with the Sunrise sprites is actually very similar to the one I use in order to paint the Tell a Demon art: a drawing, followed by an underpainting, followed by a final overpainting (example on my Tumblr, here). This basic process, by the way, is pretty similar to that of the Renaissance masters.

CGs? What CGs?

Prior to Sunrise, I was a slower digital painter, probably due to the fact that I did not have clearly defined steps before. Or, not clearly defined like I had for my traditional art. Although I spent more time on the sprites than any other part of the process, I was surprised at how quickly the Sunrise sprites went. Each one took about three evenings, including the expressions, despite that some expressions required me to re-paint significant portions of the characters' faces.

Although I painted the expressions on transparent layers, I painted the poses on an opaque layer. Later on, I cut out the sprites using masks made in Illustrator. I find this to be a faster and more forgiving method since it allows me to easily change the contours of the character and I don't have to worry about accidentally painting on the wrong layer.

Overall, I felt like my work and working method improved over NaNoRenO. Hazel-Bun also helped here by drawing concept sketches and character designs to work from and offering me feedback on the look of each sprite as I painted them.

One problem I stumbled across was the painted style. I used two Photoshop brushes for the character painting, and as a result the brush strokes look very digital. I prefer to combine digital and traditional textures for this reason, but in future I would explore using different digital tools so that the digital look wasn't so overt. I would also prefer to spend some more time on the characters; Sofia, as the last sprite I painted, began to look a little more stylized than the others.